Just when you thought your buzz word vocabulary was at maximum capacity, we're dragging out a new one. Wait for it… FRIA (Feature Rich Internet Application). Are you amazed, shocked, awed? Are you prostrate and humbled before the mere acronym? Probably not. So, you ask yourself, why make up a new buzz word to be over used by the masses, sought after by executives and misused by every Tom, Dick and hairy geek on the blogosphere? Why? Because it's fun and we can? No. Because we are egotistical sadistic tech geeks with a twisted sense of humor? Of course, but sadly, not the reason. Because RIA is pretty much useless when it comes to business application development and we're sick of justifying its use by pigeon-holing what we do into that lame buzz word? Bingo! Let's start with why RIA (Rich Internet Application) bugs us. The idea leaped into the mainstream when Macromedia released a white paper on it in 2002. The concept was simple, yet revolutionary. A RIA is an Internet application that affords richer functionality by taking advantage of the client's CPU to offer real-time user-interface options that are not possible with the standard HTML widgets available to browser-based Web applications. O.K., that wasn't as simple to explain as I'd imagined. But, you're a geek if you're reading this and you get it- the implications of such a technology are endless. And we love it in theory. Meanwhile, back in the real world you realize that what started out as meaning all that is good and righteous about Ajax, DHTML, XML, XSLT, JavaScript, the list goes on… has taken a terrible turn down that boulevard of broken dreams known only as Macromedia Flash. It seems that almost every time I catch someone mentioning RIA, the next sentence is usually about a shiny red ball- like an animation, embedded movie or other eye-candy entertainment-related web 2.0-thing. Conversations about RIA rarely head down the "let's enhance usability" path that they should. Therefore, I am leaving RIA to the RIA-tards of online entertainment and adopting FRIA as my new buzz-kill word of the day for business application development. What, pray tell, is FRIA? FRIA (Feature Rich Internet Application) is all that RIA should be, but never could be: a thin client application that behaves like and improves upon the fat client feature sets, work flow navigation, functionality and responsiveness. FRIA methodology is the strategic use of technologies on either the client or server side that improve the quality of features in a web application to enhance usability through taking the best of the fat client interface and improving upon it. When properly implemented, FRIA tools like color pickers, sliders, progress bars, drag and drop list boxes, etc. should:

1. Behave intuitively (i.e.- Paris Hilton's pet mokey should be able to figure out what it does)
2. Be placed in such a way that they enhance work flow (i.e. nix the visual transitions between screens- it just eats up time and makes the application seem slow)
3. Not cause a user's attention to drift from the work at hand (i.e.- if someone says "hey, that looks cool," you are in violation of this commandment.)

The simple difference between RIA and FRIA is while RIA calls attention to flashy animations, blinking buttons, fades, music and videos, FRIA tools focus on making a user's experience efficient and easy. So, in real terms, what am I talking about? Buttons should look and act like buttons, visual tool bars should exist for easy and familiar navigation, progress bars should allow users to know where they are in any execution, visual metaphors should be utilized to represent real business processes and facilitate work flow- color pickers, sliders, drag and drop list boxes, graphing tools, etc. should be used only when appropriate for the task. I know that FRIA sounds like RIA's slightly socialist sister, but, while she might take a little bit of the esthetic delight out of the application, she makes it a whole lot more useful for the paying customer. And, in the end, isn't that what matters, getting paid by satisfied customers?

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